


definition

by takingyournarrative



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fae, Fluff, Gertrude is only mentioned, It/Its Pronouns For Michael | The Distortion (The Magnus Archives), M/M, Mary Keay's A+ Parenting, Names, Other, in a fae way, in which michael shelley is a witch's boy who becomes a faerie, including a couple brief mentions of blood, she's a witch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-17
Updated: 2020-11-17
Packaged: 2021-03-09 17:40:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27600139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/takingyournarrative/pseuds/takingyournarrative
Summary: Its voice sounded almost strangled, like it was unsure how or whether to put its thoughts into words. It had stopped pacing and stood in the center of the clearing, regarding him with eyes that looked more sure than it sounded. Gerry had started shaking, and did not know when.“Do you trust me?” it asked.He was quiet for a long moment. “Yes. I trust you, Michael.”It nodded — so solemn, and still it hovered for a moment. “May I approach?”
Relationships: Gerard Keay/Michael Shelley
Comments: 17
Kudos: 67





	definition

Michael Shelley was a witch’s boy. Autumn came and he was off and away up the hill again, blond curls vanishing among the trees to grow long and wild by the time he returned at the summer solstice. They watched him go and wondered at it, the easy smile on his face, the way he waved through their half-shuttered windows and threw his scarf over his shoulder as though he hadn’t a care in the world. He was sweet. He was strange. Nobody trusted him, and he trusted everyone.  
He left behind a trail of goodbyes on his way out of the village: a bundle of flowers pressed into the baker’s hands along with a handful of coins, scraps of the warm bread he’d just bought scattered along the road for the geese, a small carving tossed to a curious child. The baker looked askance at his wife, and she nodded to the fire. The flowers were slow to catch, only blackening around the edges, smoking and withering for a long time before they were consumed. The geese ate the bread thankfully, but the child’s mother took the carving and crushed it under a rock. Michael was around the bend before he could hear the crying.   
In the tall, thin house at the end of the road, Mary Keay stood at the high window and said again that the Shelley boy was a fool, enthralling himself to powers he didn’t understand. Her son nodded and did not look outside to see him go. He knew what Michael Shelley looked like; he had him memorized.   
Michael Shelley was a witch’s boy, and Gerry Keay had never spoken to him. He would watch him pass every autumn and every summer solstice, hover too long on street corners in the summer to see him wandering back late from the meadows, flowers tangled in his hair. Once, he had smiled openly, watching Michael hand out dandelions for luck, and Mary had taken his wrist like a vise and dragged him away to scold him.   
“Only fools put  _ faith  _ in those things, Gerard,” she had said;  _ faith  _ like a curse, like an omen, like a verdict. Like a spell, maybe; remembering it, Gerry would wonder whether she was really that different from the powers she hated.   
But Michael Shelley passed in the street in the autumn of his sixteenth year, and Gerry looked away from the window and turned another page in another bloodstained book. 

Gerry Keay was twenty when his mother died. For all her meddling with powers she professed not to serve, she gave herself to them in the end, and Gerry patiently washed her blood from the floorboards and held her book for only a moment before placing it on the fire with something almost like reverence. He smelled like iron and smoke for a week, and when he walked in the village he looked at the ground and accepted their judgment. Michael Shelley alone smiled at him —  _ the witch’s boy and the matricidal son _ , they whispered,  _ it stands to reason _ — and he for once he did not see, and missed the chance to catalogue that sad reassurance with the rest of Michael’s fleeting presence in his memory.  
But he was master of his mother’s house now, and that autumn he could stand in the window and watch Michael go. Michael cast a glance upward as he passed, and Gerry almost thought he saw him — the barest flicker of a grin on his face — and then he swung forward again and continued up the path and was gone.   
Gone for good, it seemed, because that summer Michael did not return from the house on the hill. The villagers said it was expected, and Gerry Keay said nothing, but placed a bundle of dandelions on his windowsill and quietly mourned the sweet beautiful witch’s boy who was never quite there.  
He had a thousand thousand memories of Michael Shelley, and they had never spoken once; they were not in a position to be acquainted, but nobody could avoid anybody at the edge of the woods, and Michael was bright and noticeable and, unlike Gerry, had never tried to hide.  
The gap-toothed smile of a child dwarfed by his scarf, tossing pinecones over the street. A blur of golden hair and blue dresses and legs too long for his age. A figure sitting high up on a roof, cupping a mug of something in his right hand, feeding the doves with his left. Steam curling in gentle, shifting patterns into unseasonably cool air. Laughing up the hill in the autumn, and laughing back down in summertime; soft face, soft hair, a voice that tripped over itself, marbles tumbling together in a bag. The time Gerry had gone to the river to wash blood from his mother’s dress and seen Michael sitting on the opposite bank, his back to Gerry, weaving flowers into his hair. There were freckles on his shoulders. The flowers were a thousand shades of blue and red and yellow. He was exquisite, and Gerry hardened his heart and left before he turned around.  
And now Michael was gone. Nobody would ask the witch on the hill what she had done with him; they would whisper in the tavern and the quiet sunlit corners of the bakery but nobody really cared; nobody had trusted him, anyway. It might well have been his own fault. In a week, he would be forgotten.  
Or perhaps not so easily left behind — for all the village had liked to believe him pointless, tainted, doomed, he had been good. And even those who had turned most disdainfully when he had passed wondered at his absence; they did not  _ miss  _ the crow-child, his bright things and his strange laugh, but nobody could deny that summertime was quieter without him.   
Gerry in particular felt lonely; his mother was dead and Michael was likely the same, and though he had known but not cared for the one and cared for but not known the other, they had amounted to something of a whole. The village still looked askance when he passed, expecting again that smell of smoke and blood, and he did not often pass among them. He took to his window for hours at a time, watching the birds dance at the fringes of the forest, carts rumbling by on the street below, bound for danger and destitution as likely as not.   
And when the window began to reflect his mother in the dark room behind him and the smell of blood soaked once again from the floorboards, he left the house and wandered out, across the meadows, looking up blankly at the sky and wondering at the way he couldn’t find a single pattern in the clouds.  
The entrance to the woods was dark, and perhaps he should have known not to go in, but he was alone and fiercely reckless in his new independence; and Michael had gone to the woods, and Michael was gone, but Gerry for all he had suffered had always held on to something like hope. Not quite — nothing so direct — perhaps it was closer, in the end, to determination.    
Regardless, he walked into the forest after only a moment’s hesitation, and did not look back. 

It was not as dark beneath the trees as it looked from the outside; really, it was positively peaceful. Light filtered through the leaves and landed like dropped coins on the moss, dark green-gold on the spruce needles littering the ground. He began to hum, all fear of disturbing whatever dark powers he had expected to meet lost to the motes floating like tiny stars in the air, the mushrooms in little pale clusters on the sides of logs.   
He didn’t know what he was humming. He didn’t know the names of many songs — Mary had never given him much time for music — but he listened. Words and melodies overheard on the street jumbled and unclear in his head, stitched together into an off-kilter walking song.  
Gerry did not want to stop walking. He didn’t intend to leave behind his house; he knew that, in the end, he would return, not because he wanted to but because he had to. It had never been a haven or even a home, but it was the only certainty he had. The only real thing.   
The muted greens and golds of the woods faded so gradually he nearly didn’t notice it happening. Fuschia blossoms brushed against his face; cerulean moss clambered up the side of a tree; little yellow flowers — dandelions? — brushed his ankles, moving in a wind that did not exist. By the time he realized what he was seeing, the world was full of color and it was almost overwhelming, but beautiful.   
He stopped walking. Stood for a moment in awe, reached up a hand to touch one of the hanging vines, the delicate petals of the flowers. “Gonna stay here forever,” he murmured to himself. It was a strange thing, being able to speak aloud, but he’d grown accustomed to it in the lonely winter months. At first it had been suffocating, the silence; preferable to how it had been before — anything was preferable to Mary’s voice — but stifling nonetheless. He did not know how to speak for himself; it had mostly been apologies and pleas and the occasional incantation for Mary, and speaking when unspoken-to had been unforgivable. With nobody to answer to, he had been silent, until choking on dust and air had become too much, and he had started whispering to himself.   
Eventually it had become a habit, rambling for his ears alone, if only to fill up the silence. It wasn’t company, but he wasn’t sure he was doing it to stave off loneliness anyway. Sound was comforting, and silence was almost frightening. He hated the way it made him feel — like he was trapped in a state of constant anticipation — so he spoke and tried not to fear interruption.   
Something interrupted him, though. Here, in the deep reaches of the forest nobody entered, something began to laugh. And though it was not an ordinary laugh — it was too all-encompassing, too echoing — it was familiar. He couldn’t place it, not immediately. He knew it, though, that sound like stones tumbled together at the bottom of a stream, tripping over itself, gentle and lilting.   
_ Oh _ .  
He was frozen for a long moment, suspended in a breath, his voice cut off in his throat.  
“Hello, sweet thing.”  
Someone behind him. Someone with a voice just a step to the left of Michael’s — he knew it so clearly, remembered the way it had bounded down the street, remembered the scent of soil baking in the sun and lilacs dying on the side of the road and Michael Shelley calling greetings to the people who hated him.   
“Michael?” he asked, without turning around.  
“No,” said the voice that belonged to Michael. “I do not have a name.”  
He turned. Drew in a long, slow, shaking breath.  
He was looking up at a person — a creature? — that was not quite Michael Shelley. Like his voice, a step removed: its hair was longer, its eyes closer to silver than their old clear grey, too-long hands folded over its chest, the fingers spindly and gnarled like old wood. Its head was tilted just slightly to the right, and it was grinning with something like amusement and something like curiosity down at Gerry Keay. There were flowers tangled in its curls, a thousand shades of blue and red and yellow. “May I have  _ your _ name?” it asked him.  
Now he understood and was afraid. “Of course not,” he said — when had his instinct become confrontation? he should have turned and run — and the faerie laughed loud and raucous, its grin splitting the sides of its face.  
“Very clever, lovely one! You may call me Michael.”  
He stood there, paralysed, staring at it. It only smiled back. Maddening, that smile. Almost sweet, like Michael Shelley’s. Almost something else.  
“What did you do to him?” Gerry asked after a long while.  
That laugh again. “Nothing! I did nothing whatsoever to him. The witch,  _ Gertrude _ , she did something. I am still not entirely sure what. Fed him to me, I suppose, though I certainly did not wish to eat. Traded my name for his — a falsehood, his scrap of a name — and  _ I _ do not have a name anymore.”  
“Why?” He didn’t know why he was asking it questions, why he didn’t just leave. Its fingers looked sharp and its eyes looked dangerous, and he tried to convince himself he was afraid, and nothing more.  
“Because I’m dangerous,” it giggled. “Or I was; and she was afraid. She wanted to stop me.” It leaned closer — infinitesimally closer, a hairsbreadth — “Wouldn’t you be afraid?”  
“I’m not afraid of anything,” Gerry Keay lied.  
“Oh, sweet thing, do not lie to me. It isn’t fair. I cannot lie; so you must return the favor.”  
“What do you want with me?”  
“I … I am not certain. It was  _ you  _ who wandered into my domain.”  
_ Of course _ . It made sense — the flowers, the colors everywhere — if Michael Shelley had the power to create a  _ domain _ , it would be this. But then —  
“Why do you look like Michael?”   
“ _ So _ inquisitive. I am … part of him? He is part of me. Either way, I am not entirely myself and he is almost entirely gone, and I would not worry myself too grievously over the particulars if I were you, wanderer.”  
“Right.” His voice was hoarse; his throat had gone dry. “Can I leave?”  
“Do you want to leave?”  
He felt dizzy. He wasn’t certain whether he  _ did  _ want to leave, really — for all that it was tall and sharp and grinning at him like a Cheshire cat he felt safe here. “I … don’t think I do,” he conceded.   
“Delightful.” And it genuinely sounded delighted — there was glee, undeniable joy in its voice. That more than anything else unsettled him.   
They stood for a moment, regarding one another. It was taller than Gerry by nearly a head, and grinning down at him clothed in pink silk and flower petals it was somehow everything he had been told the fae were and yet nothing at all like what he had expected.   
They were beautiful; he knew that, inhuman and exquisite and ethereal. It certainly was. Despite the sharpness of its smile, the way its eyes seemed to twist and spiral in on themselves, the unnerving movements of its hair — perhaps, even, because of these things — it was gorgeous, radiant, lovely. Its cheeks were pink and he couldn’t remember if they had been so before.   
And certainly, it looked dangerous — it  _ felt  _ dangerous, as the fae were supposed to. He knew lingering in its domain was a bad idea, that if it wanted to it could stop time and trap him while a thousand years passed outside, that if he ate anything it offered him he would be unable to escape it, that, above all, if he slipped and gave it his name it would have the deepest parts of himself, the fulcrum of his being.   
And yet — it was something of Michael Shelley. He knew this; it could not lie. It could twist its words, certainly, but he did not believe it had. He could not think of a possible other meaning to  _ I am part of him; he is part of me _ , and it had sounded so genuinely uncertain when it spoke.   
“Do you — how much of Michael Shelley is still … you?”  
It raised an eyebrow. “A fascinating question. Some memories. A few motives. Little else. You will not find your friend alive and well in me.”  
“Michael Shelley wasn’t my friend.”  
It sighed. “I know. He wanted to be, though.”  
Gerry stared at it. Michael Shelley had scarcely so much as looked his way; he had had no reason to believe Michael knew him as a face apart from the crowd. And now this faerie that wore his face, dripping with his flowers, laughing his laugh —  _ this  _ creature stood before him and said that Michael Shelley had wanted to be his friend.  
“You’re lying,” he said, on instinct.  
“Of course I am not lying. I cannot lie, little ember.”  
Gerry frowned a little at the epithet; they were getting stranger by the minute. “He didn’t even know me.”  
“He saw you. He worried for you. He was … fond of you, in a distant way. I think I feel much the same. I am glad you decided to stay.”  
Gerry shivered. The sun was sinking, so perhaps it was the coming night; but he wasn’t cold, and he knew it. “Are you going to trap me here?”   
“No. I would not keep a willing prisoner.”  
That was concerning; but so was everything about this Michael. Gerry looked at it for a long moment and moved to sit down on a log. It followed his motion with its eyes but made no objection, and, after a moment, leaned against a tree in a show of faux-nonchalance. “Tell me about yourself, pretty thing.”  
He ignored the lightness he felt at that voice, at the strange sweet endearments it was substituting for his name. “What do you want to know?”  
“Your name, first,” it giggled, “if you will let me.”  
He shook his head.  
“Very well; tell me about your mother.”  
“Why should I tell you about  _ her _ ?” he snapped, but it did not look alarmed. Its face was calm as ever, the shifting silver of its eyes focused on him with a strange sort of benign intensity.  
“Michael worried about her; about how she was to you. It is heavy on my mind even now.”  
Michael  _ worried  _ about him. “She’s dead now,” he said. “I’m fine.”  
It tilted its head again — a curious birdlike movement, softly inquisitive. It said nothing. Unspoken, perhaps:  _ are you _ ?  
Gerry ran his fingers over the moss on the log; let himself enjoy the play of the fading light on his fingers. The air smelled sweet here, like flowers and honey and orange peels left to dry in the sun. He did not want to think about his mother here, but she was inescapable, really; he would think about her everywhere, and maybe it would be easier if he didn’t let those thoughts fester inside of him.   
“She was cruel,” he said, slowly. “And meddled with the powers …  _ your  _ powers, I guess … without ever properly understanding them. I never really understood it, you know? She  _ hated  _ them. But she wanted to — control them? Bend them to her will, maybe. I don’t know. She hurt me. And she never let me just … get away. Not even now, really.”  
“Find your shelter here, then,” it said quietly.  
Gerry’s heart caught on the words and he felt dizzy, almost sick with confusion. The longing to accept; the dread of what that might mean.  
“Why do you care?” he asked, and there was something almost desperate in his voice.  
“Because Michael Shelley cared. You are welcome to go; but if you wish to escape her, I can make this place good for you.”  
It was a tempting offer. The glade was beautiful, and Michael had so far been nothing but kind, if perhaps a little cryptic. And yet — too many murmurings of the fae were dark and frightening; it was not just his mother who hated them, it was everyone. “Don’t you … hurt people?” he asked after a while. There was no point in relying on subtlety or euphemism with it; if it were going to hurt him, it would. And perhaps he had afforded himself some protection by denying it his name.  
“I might. Certainly I  _ can _ . Whether I  _ have _ , I am unwilling to tell you.”  
There they were: truths that could conceal any number of possible meanings, nothings masquerading as answers. So he could not trust it, and he should not stay, and yet it was bright and lovely and the sun was sunk already low enough that if he left now he would be walking home in the dark. “If I go to sleep here,” he asked, “will you promise not to hurt me?”  
“I will.”  
“Goodnight, Michael.”   
“Goodnight, sweet one.”

He woke curled on the same patch of moss he had retired to the night before, but there were flowers — little pink ones — growing up between his fingers, and something had been laid over him. He sat up, took it in his hands. Hundreds of tiny blossoms woven together by the stems into a light blanket — completely impractical, more decorative than anything else, but soft and sweet-scented like everything else here. He looked up.  
Michael was sitting a little ways away, watching him. “Did you make this?” he asked, his voice still hoarse with sleep. It nodded, and a few petals fell loose from its hair. Gerry watched their descent, the way they fluttered back and forth on their way to the ground. “Why?” he asked.  
“I do not know,” it admitted. “You did not need it, I imagine; but you looked like you might. And you were having a nightmare,” it added after a second. “Trembling. I hoped it might calm you.”  
Gerry  _ always  _ remembered his nightmares; but the last night was a blank. This was alarming, if not unwelcome. “Thank you.” His voice came out softer, more hesitant than he had intended. “Really.” It only shrugged, but that split of a grin was on its lips again, so perhaps it appreciated the gratitude more than it let on.   
Gerry stayed with it, let it show him a stream just outside its domain to drink from, ventured back into the village for food; for he would eat nothing it could offer him, and the patches of mushrooms and berries in the forest proper were not enough to sustain him indefinitely. The villagers called him wild and unhinged, but he did not hear. He took bread and pheasant and apples from the market, paid in silver left behind by his mother, and returned to Michael, who always had a story to tell or a pretty illusion to show off.  
He could not believe Michael was harmless, or even good; but it was kind and gentle and its power seemed diluted at least by whatever the witch Gertrude had done. It was hard to distrust it and impossible to fear it, and day by day he found himself less and less alarmed at the delicacy of his heart, the strength of his emotions around Michael. It was beautiful. Its voice thrilled him, its laugh was a welcome sound now, and eventually the way it faded into sighs became nothing short of a welcome home.  
Its clearing indeed was a home. It waited for him where leaves turned to flowers and smiled, and every day it asked: “May I have your name, lovely one?” Every day he refused, but it was getting harder. He watched it tend to its little untameable garden with fingers too-long but elegant; saw butterflies and sunlight and moss all caught and tangled together in its curls; heard it hum off-key and staticky as he approached, silencing itself when it saw his a dark cloak amid the trees. Foolish, perhaps; downright idiocy, maybe. But he thought he loved it.  
And sometimes there was something in its voice when it asked for his name, when it said “you’re back, little traveller,” every time he returned without fail. Perhaps he was imagining it, the same way he might imagine that the pink that played across its cheeks when he looked at it was a blush. But he thought — or hoped — that it loved him too.  
One night he woke from a nightmare and found it hovering over him, silver eyes still bright in the dark. “Are you alright?” it asked, voice feather-light.  
“I — no. Yes.” He cursed. “I’m afraid.” His voice very small.  
“Can I help you, little ember?” It was hovering, backed off a few steps since he had woken and gotten his bearings, but visibly concerned.  
“No. No, I’m sorry, Michael. Thank you.”  
“I ought to be able to keep away your night terrors.”  
“Don’t worry about it. It’s not your fault.”  
It held out a hand to him, hesitant. “Stand up, pretty one. Come look at the stars.” He took the offered hand, felt its fingers strange and definitely inhuman in his. It walked him to the center of the clearing where the trees stood apart and the sky was just visible, and let go.  
They stood, craning their necks, and after a moment it touched his shoulder and guided him down. Side by side in the grass, nevermind the dewdrops, a foot apart and looking up into the night. “I do not recall much about breathing,” it began; “I have not needed to myself in some months, now. But here, with me —” and it hummed, and Gerry breathed in and out with the notes, which were off-key and wrong, but soothing.   
“I will tell you a story,” it continued. Gerry loved its stories — rambling, arcane, truthful in the sincerity with which it believed them. He would never know, he assumed, whether they had really happened; and even if they had, it was too long ago or too far in the future or too entirely mixed-up for it to matter much. What mattered was Michael’s voice, Michael’s words, Michael’s presence washing over him more than the stars ever could, soothing him out of the memory of Mary and blood and sickness.  
“Thank you,” he mumbled when Michael’s story was over.  
“Of course, nameless one.”  
“You’re really hung up on my name, aren’t you?” he said, sitting up and hugging his knees to his chest. It followed suit, cross-legged, resting its head on its hand.   
“Yes.”  
“Why?”  
“I am … not sure.”  
“This isn’t some long game to get — power over me, or something?” he asked. The night was opening him, carving the last vestiges of fear out of his heart’s cavity and bringing them in between them.  
“I do not wish for any such thing. I do not want to control you.”  
“Then — why?”  
It stood up, paced the length of the clearing, and Gerry found his feet as well, hovering on the ragged edges of the shadows. “A name is — to give me your name would be to allow me to know you in the most … hm … as you are. The name you choose, claim for your own — it has power, certainly, a power derived from the definition you give yourself. And I do not care for the power, lovely one; I care for you, and so … it is significant to me how you define yourself, I suppose.”  
Its voice sounded almost strangled, like it was unsure how or whether to put its thoughts into words. It had stopped pacing and stood in the center of the clearing, regarding him with eyes that looked more sure than it sounded. Gerry had started shaking, and did not know when.   
“Do you trust me?” it asked.  
He was quiet for a long moment. “Yes. I trust you, Michael.”  
It nodded — so solemn, and still it hovered for a moment. “May I approach?”  
So strange the question, so gently asked; Gerry nodded. It drew near, so close he could feel something soft and static coming from its skin. “Nobody has ever trusted me before.”  
Tree bark rough against his back. Michael, in front of him, looking seconds from reaching out. The stars spun dizzy over the darkened treeline.  
“Get used to it,” said Gerry, his voice barely above a whisper. His hands were shaking.  
He reached out for Michael first, wrapped his fingers around its wrist and pulled it close; it came willingly, raising a hand as it did so to rest with terrible lightness against the side of his face. Its fingers were too long, but so warm, so gentle where they brushed against his cheek, his jaw, his neck —  
It was very close. He wanted to dissolve, collapse into it.  
“Your name, sweet thing?” it murmured, and Gerry Keay leaned forward until their lips brushed together and whispered his own name into its mouth. It swallowed it. Gerry gave in entirely and kissed it at last, let it press him back against the tree. It was overwhelming. It was so terribly sweet.  
“Gerry,” it said in the end, and he felt it in the map of his veins, live-wire power that he knew it would not use.  
“Please kiss me,” he said, breathless still. And it complied. It was very real, and very soft, and yet something about it was gently, indefinably inhuman; the way its mouth felt on his, perhaps, or the way it moved: too easily, with too much languor to be entirely bound by its body in the same way Gerry was. And its hands, too long, bracing him against the tree; its hair, too voluminous by half to have grown in any familiar way.  
But it felt right, kissing Michael, and he held its petal-soft face in his hands and whispered the name that did not belong to it, and the stars tumbled over the black scope of the heavens until light pierced the horizon and they sat side by side in the moss. Gerry leaned back against Michael’s chest and breathed out a hundred fears into the morning.  
“Gerry,” said Michael, and the shiver that went through him the first time was gone now; Michael spoke the name into his heart and it glowed there, safe in Michael’s voice. “I love you.”  
“I love you, too, Michael,” said Gerry Keay.   
It laughed. Genuine, joyous laughter. “If only I had a name to give you in return,” it offered, and Gerry shrugged.   
“A name doesn’t mean anything when I say it, anyway,” he said. “I’ll call you Michael, or love, and that’ll be fine by me if it’s fine by you.”  
“Oh, on the contrary.” Gerry tilted his head back further, looking up at Michael in some concern. “You give some meaning to a name that was never mine to begin with. But,” it added after a moment of contemplation, “you may call me love.”  
Gerry grinned. Its voice was light, teasing, and he felt the same lightness in himself, sinking through his skin and living somewhere inside of him. He picked up its hand and kissed it; listened to it hum a response, quiet and happy.

Autumn came and Michael offered Gerry Keay a pomegranate, which he ate. In the village, they assumed he was dead, and in a week the witch’s boy and the matricidal son were forgotten in name at least. 


End file.
